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astroengine (1577233) writes "When you think of a celestial ring system, the beautiful ringed planet Saturn will likely jump to mind. But for the first time astronomers have discovered that ring systems aren't exclusive to planetary bodies — asteroids can have them too. Announced on Wednesday, astronomers using several observatories in South America, including the ESO's La Silla Observatory in Chile, have discovered that distant asteroid Chariklo possesses two distinct rings. Chariklo, which is approximately 250 kilometers (155 miles) wide, is the largest space rock in a class of asteroids known as Centaurs that orbit between Saturn and Uranus in the outer solar system. 'We weren't looking for a ring and didn't think small bodies like Chariklo had them at all, so the discovery — and the amazing amount of detail we saw in the system — came as a complete surprise!' said lead researcher Felipe Braga-Ribas, of the Observatório Nacional and MCTI, in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil."

When you take the time to look at concepts like the hill sphere and the roche sphere I can see where it would put the question of how sustainable would a ring system be for a small body given the larger neighbors that it has.

I imagine any reasonable cosmologist or astronomer would have said that it was certainly possible but only in a narrow lane of circumstances.

I get the word "discovered" here, but... I wouldn't think that gravity is exclusive to planetary bodies. Anything with significant gravity can have a ring system under the right conditions.

True. But the smaller and weaker the gravitational field is, or the more perturbed it is, the lower the chance for a ring system to form let alone remain stable. Not to mention, there's a huge difference between something being theoretically (if extraordinarily remotely) possible and actually observing said thing in the wild.

Dig deeper, and you soon hit the Planck length [wikipedia.org], so, no. Really small things don't resemble larger things at all. That's why QM is so counter-intuitive. Heck, you don't even have to dig that deep to realize that an atom does not resemble the solar system, even though both have small things orbiting a large central mass.

For that matter, go the other way, and you hit the light-speed barrier, which has a huge effect on the way really big things work. The very large and the very small are both immensely different from each other and from things on what we consider a normal, human scale. Your notion is poetic, but contradicts most of the physics discovered since the early 20th c.

Heck, you don't even have to dig that deep to realize that an atom does not resemble the solar system, even though both have small things orbiting a large central mass.

Actually electrons DON'T orbit nuclei. What they do is more akin to being standing waves surrounding them. With the opposite charges on the electrons and the nuclei, if they orbited in the classical mechanics sense they'd continuously emit electromagnetic radiation and the orbit would quickly decay. This is part of what put physicists ont

It's still referred to as an orbit, even if it doesn't resemble a classical orbit.

What they do is more akin to being standing waves surrounding them.

Except that, unlike what's usually referred to as a wave at that level, it has nothing to do with frequency. It's more of a probability wave. But it's still subject to the exclusion principle, which really complicates matters. Two electrons can't occupy the same location, but location itself is a tricky concept at that scale.

Anyway, all of that just goes to make my point. The very small (and the very large) are not like what w